Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday November 13, 2011 @09:59AM
from the just-like-mom-used-to-grow dept.

wanzeo writes "Within the last decade, many of us have experienced the encroachment of ethics into our mealtime. Phrases such as vegetarian, vegan, organic, bST, GMO, etc. have become part of common grocery store advertising. The most recent addition to the list of ethically charged food is in-vitro meat, or meat that was cultured in a petri dish, and was never part of a live animal. The project has been brought to fruition by Mark Post, a biologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Grown using animal stem-cells on a nutrient medium, the nearly see-through strips of muscle would need to be stacked nearly 3,000 times to approach the thickness of a burger. The practice promises to be more humane, sustainable, and efficient than conventional meats, with one analysis suggesting it would, 'use 35 to 60 percent less energy, emit 80 to 95 percent less greenhouse gas and use around 98 percent less land.' In a world where nearly half of all crop production is used to feed livestock, a move towards artificial meat may be inevitable."

There was also a short sci-fi story (can't remember the title) where the origin of the popular in-vitro meat turns out to be human (from one of the scientists/researchers). Can't remember the details though...

The movie is titled . Soylent Green [wikipedia.org]. Charlton Heston played the lead. It is a whodunnit set in future where the Earth has completely exhausted resources and the government is distributing the soylent red and soylent green wafers, ostensibly derived from sea weed. Shocking revelation is that oceans have turned caustic and they do not support life. Then where do these wafers come from? Charlton finds out, but could not escape the goons chasing him. He just manages to deliver one short message to others, "Soylent.... Green... is.... people".

Like a lot of cleaners, I started out in public health, running DNA analyses in a forensic laboratory. That was ten years ago, when the meat trade was at its height. We were processing ten thousand samples a day. Most were fakes. 'Princess Di' for instance, was originally a basal cell cancer excised from a fifty-eight-year-old Albanian woman, but it didn't stop the meatleggers moving twenty tonnes of product. Then fans started doing their own DNA analyses, and growing their own supplies. Once someone has started a cloned cell line, anyone with an incubator, access to a few common biochemicals, and basic knowledge about cell culture can keep it going indefinitely. By the time I joined one of the vat-busting teams, most of the meat we were chasing was one hundred per cent genuine cloned celebrity. As soon as anyone managed to get a viable scrap of tissue, that was it. The meat was out there. The only way to stop it was to bust the places where it was grown.

This sounds awesome. I love meat, best part of any meal, however I don't like the whole killing cattle thing, but it's a necessary evil for me, as I'm not willing to give it up. However, this would be the best of both worlds.

It will be able to be mass manufactured in large quantities, and hopefully cheaply. It reduces energy usage. Reduces carbon emissions. Reduces land usage.

These are all HUGE wins. As long as food companies get serious on it (which they likely would), then you can get flawless, tasty steaks, for cheap as fuck. I don't care if it's not "authentic", I wan't my pseudo-lamb meat!

My guess is it would take a while before they were able to get it up to the mass manufacturing stage, and even further before they're producing meat with the nice tasting fat, and other impurities. Though, once it's at the mass manufacturing stage, people will start eating it, mainly people who like gamey meat though.

Monsanto will patent it, claim real meat infringes, then make us all eat it. No labelling of fake meat will be allowed, so we won't know what we are eating. At that time maybe I'll try the frankensalmon.

I'm actually fine with this idea of 'fake meat', as long as it's done well. If it tastes and behaves similarly to 'real meat', and is made from actual real animal cells... I'm just fine with the idea. I'd be more worried about genetically modified meat -- but this stuff is not modified in that way. It's just cells grown in a non-standard incubation system (i.e., a lab dish, as opposed to a sack of other meat cells).

I'm actually fine with this idea of 'fake meat', as long as it's done well. If it tastes and behaves similarly to 'real meat', and is made from actual real animal cells... I'm just fine with the idea...

I don't see this tasting or feeling anything like real meat. Sure, it may be layers of mean protein stacked on top of each other, but meat is more than that. Meat comes with fat. That's the stuff that makes meat juicy. Sometimes, meat comes on a bone. That's like a handle. Meat can be light or dark depending on what part of the animal it comes from. It may be tough, meaning that it must be cooked for hours to tender it up. It may be tender, meaning that it should be flash cooked. And finally, meat has a texture, or "grain" that needs to be adhered to. You must cut meat AGAINST the grain or else it becomes stringy and tough. I don't care how well a piece of meat is cooked, if it's cut wrong, it's tough.

Anyway, my point is that petri-meat will have none of these qualities. The only thing I see this good for is ground meat where the texture doesn't matter, and even then, animal fat will have to be added from another petri dish from a biproduct of a real animal, which kinda defeats the purpose. That may not work either because I don't know if there is a flavor difference between fat grown on a cows back vs the fat that grows in the skin. Come to think of it, bacon fat tastes a whole to different than pork chop fat.

We will not have a synthetic steak that will fool anyone until we are capable of growing full organs as layers of muscle protein is not going to full anyone that has ever eaten meat before.

It's predicted that meat will be too expensive for most of the world's population by 2050, and some scientists have proposed that westerners should eat insects instead. See entomophagy [wikipedia.org].

I'd quite like to try some of the big insects. I've tried some tiny ones (waxworms and crickets) and found them tasteless except for the sauce they were served in.

Insects have some advantages over mammals, birds and fish. They like to live in colonies, which is good for factory farming. They're very high in protein -- sometimes as much as 70%, compared to about 15% by mass for a cow. They take a lot less energy to produce. And many humans already eat them, unlike in-vitro muscle.

It's predicted that meat will be too expensive for most of the world's population by 2050, and some scientists have proposed that westerners should eat insects instead.

We've heard this Malthusian nonsense for two centuries now, and not only is it still not true, there's more abundance of food (including meat) than ever before, even with a population hitting 7 billion. As long as there are free markets, there will be enough food. Farmers and companies will find a way.

All of those points above have been thought of which is why it's taking so long to develop something that resembles muscle tissue. Here's an interview of a scientist working on it - audio and transcript:
Growing meat in the lab (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2011/3281329.htm)

Free-range animals have systems for dealing with exposure to chemicals, diseases, and other toxins. Scrupulous ranchers pay attention to them and cull their herds. The kind that free range the animals are more likely to be that type than the feedlot fuckers who stink up our cities with their cattle standing hip to hip, which means you need to shoot them full of antibiotics because they're always passing any illness right back and forth.

It's also much easier to detect toxins in a lab, let alone track down the source.

If free-range animals suddenly start coming back as having say lead exposure, you have to look in the water, the wind, any plants they might have eaten, any fertilizers you may have used on any of those plants, any feed you gave them--and even once you find the source, you have to find a way around the problem, since farms aren't what you call mobile. Compared to that, looking at the tools you put in the lab to produce the product (also known as "quality control") isn't exactly going out of your way.

If this meat were to hit the market, the stuff you buy would not be made in a lab. It would be made in a factory. Your current meat is processed in a factory too. The fear that there would be increased chance of exposure to hazardous chemicals is irrational.

What is intellectually dishonest is to call the place it would be made a "lab", and imply that this indicates the presence more hazardous chemicals than where food is processed now. As it is now, there are hazardous chemicals in virtually every single factory, and virutally every single restaurant, grociery store and farm for that matter.

Let's rephrase the question. Does it seem wise to use a technology for which there are many known, proven, and well understood benefits out of the fear that some highly unlikely unknown unknown will appear at an undetermined date later in the future, despite no scientific evidence that it will and no way to falsify the claim?

No, but in spite of that, we still don't produce the majority of our food organically.

Keep in mind that the main alternative (and no, organic unicorn shit is not a viable alternative) is to use inefficient and environmentally destructive methods of weed control, chemically intensive ways of pest and disease control, and energy intensive fertilizers,

Wrong and wrong. The inefficient and environmentally destructive method of farming involving pesticides and energy intensive fertilizers is the one involving GMO. We produce GMO crops to try to deal with the drawbacks of so-called "green revolution" agriculture, which is a fairly imaginative euphemism for "monocultural farming". The crops which are most commonly GMO (like corn and soy) are typically grown (in a "big agribu

Selecting is modifying. Selecting for traits changes the genes. Inserting traits changes the genes too. There's a difference, but not that great of one. In one case we change the genome, in the other we change the genome.

If I go to a bar and select a beer rather than a glass of wine, that doesn't make me a brewer.

If I go to a bar and raise my BAC, it doesn't matter if I did it with beer or wine.

I realize that if all meat was synthetic, there would be no need to label it as such. I was just referencing the fact that in Pennsylvania and other states, there was a market for milk from cows not being given growth hormone. In Pennsylvania, the secretary of agriculture was set to disallow the labelling of milk as being free of growth hormone. There was enough pushback from those wanting to buy growth hormone-free milk and those just wanting to know what they were drinking to force the secretary to backtrack on the order. I was angry and still am angry that a state official was comfortable hiding what was in our food for the sake of lobbying interests. I was just trying to make the point that we are being force-fed GM foods, and in most cases, there have been no long term studies as to safety. I was trying to make humorously the point that GM foods are being rammed down our throats whether we like it our not, and regardless of safety concerns. Call me crazy, but I still want to make my own life choices, and not have the government and corporations make them for me. Just for the record, in food, "you won't notice the difference" does not equate to safe to eat. Safe to eat is actually the most important part of "mission accomplished".

We've been safely eating genetically modified foods for millennia. It's a bit bizarre that we somehow choose to label the latest method of modifying animal or plant genetics as "GM" but not the rest, giving many the entirely false impression that the bread and steak and other foodstuffs they and their ancestors have been eating for generations aren't genetically modified. But then, in a world where people ask, "When did wild poodles roam the Earth?" I suppose it's unsurprising. Sad, but unsurprising...

Are you trying to imply that the genetic change that has so far occurred in crops is not as significant as the introduction of human inserted transgenes because humans have co-evolved with those crops? Well, that's pretty silly for two big reasons. First, the changes to the crops are far too rapid for any sort of co-evolution. Things really sped up after the discovery of Mendelian genetics and they've only gotten faster since. Second, how many millenia has most of the world been eating corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, blueberries, or sunflower seed? Since those are all new world crops, not that long actually. I like lychees, persimmon, jicama, mayapple, amaranth, and goumi, among plenty of other 'new' crops. I'm probably the first person in my ancestry to try them. Kiwis, mangoes, macademia nuts, and starfruit are pretty new additions to the western diet. Who knows how many unique proteins exist in those species. If what you say is true, then it would make sense to restrict your diet to crops that were present wherever your ancestry was a few thousand years ago. Fortunately, that's really bad advice. The human body is designed to digest proteins (currently, the only things produced in GE crops are proteins, although building the pathways for secondary metabolites like beta carotene is possible), and aside from an very small minority that cause allergies, they're all processed the same. Doesn't matter where the protein came from or how it got there.

Because, uh, nobody lived in the New World to eat (and breed, corn in particular) that food until the Europeans showed up?

That was the point I was trying to make about how the notion that humans co-evolved with their crops just doesn't mean anything here. Unless you're a Native American, you didn't get New World crops until then.

I note, also, that tetanus, botulin, diphtheria, and shiga toxins are all proteins.

So's snake venom. My point is that the vast majority of proteins, even if we include species that we don't eat, are still harmless. Again, not that it really matters since any protein inserted into GE crops is studied pretty intensively first.

Old-style crossbreeding is rather different from some of the stuff we're doing now.

Yeah, but its still changing the genes. If you breed some new trait, there's something controlling it. That isn't much different than just inserting it from some other source. Consider the three traits currently inserted into crops: the insect resistance trait (the Bt ones), herbicide resistance, and virus resistance. These are really pretty benign. The herbicide resistance trait is either a bacterial form of EPSP synthase (plants already have a form of this, the only difference is that this one lacks the site that the herbicide glyphosate binds to) or the enzyme produced by the bar gene that degrades glufosinate (which I confess I don't know as much about but I have no reason to suspect a specific enzyme of anything any more than any other enzyme making up all the pathways in plants). The virus resistance trait uses a gene from the viral coat protein of the virus, and you end up with a lot more of that protein in the non-GE version than the GE version (also, it relies on a defensive mRNA shutdown process so not all that horribly much is even converted into a protein). Neither of those seem exceptionally scary to me (and of course lets not forget that you can just as easily transfer genes from species we already eat, cisgenic genes from breeding compatable species, and anti-sense traits from the very same plant). And as for the Bt one...

Bt (bacillus thuringiensis) proteins, that was never in anything that we ate before.

Bt was applied to crops for about half a century before the genes were used in genetic engineering. We know very well how they work. They're very specific, binding to specific receptors in the guts of certain insects, and the form you eat isn't even the 'toxic' form. It doesn't become active until its in an alkaline environment (I'm sure you know that human guts are acidic). Here's something to think about: if the Lepidoptera didn't exist, we'd never know that the cry proteins from Bt were 'toxins'. And my previous point still holds true about how most proteins are digested. You don't have to step too far out of your culinary comfort zone to encounter new ones. Granted, they've been consumed to some extent unless you're going hyper exotic like mandapuça or butyagela or something, but there's still lots of things that are relatively new and unconsumed, so I don't really think that's a good argument to apply to inserted proteins in GE crops, especially considering that the protein has to be studied pretty well before it can be used.

on the other hand, profit-oriented business in the US has a long track record of telling us that whatever happens to make money for them is totally harmless. You'd have to be a complete idiot to not be skeptical of whatever happy talk you heard from anyone selling you stuff.

I don't disagree. But to go the complete other direction and throw out all the science supporting GE crops just because companies stand to gain is just as bad. I'm not saying to trust the companies. You don't have to. The analogy I like to use all the time is the case of the anti-vaxers. They always say, 'Don't trust the pharma companies.' That's not a

Don't you see a big difference between selective breeding and mixing the genetic material of organisms that could never otherwise mate?

Much of the plant food you eat has been produced by crossing species that do not otherwise mate. GM foods are safer, as they involve a much smaller more targeted gene transfer, and have much more testing.

I was just trying to make the point that we are being force-fed GM foods

Who, exactly, is forcing you to eat genetically engineered food? Because there's a huge difference between you being too lazy to learn what is GE and what isn't, and someone forcing you to eat it. You're free not to eat it. You're free to buy organic food, or foods containing only crops that aren't genetically engineered. That's like a Muslim saying he's being force fed non-Halal beef. Saying you're being 'force-fed' GE crops is just being dramatic and deceitful.

And before you give me the ever popular 'oh but its not labeled so how do I know?' schtick, then listen up: corn, soy, canola, cotton, papaya (from Hawaii), summer squash, and soon, suger beet and alfalfa. If it has those in it, assume its GE. No other crop currently on the market is GE (well, there were potatoes and tomatoes but they were discontinued, and in Iran they've got GE rice). 15 seconds on Google, now you don't have to play the lazy victim anymore. You're welcome. And for reference, guess what else isn't labeled: fruit from grafted trees or vegetables/grains from hybrid seed. Not the same thing? Funny because throughout history people have made the same accusations at them that people make at GE crops today. I get that agricultural history is pretty boring but it sure is insightful. In fact, no plant improvement method is labeled. If you didn't want food produced with mutagens, induced polyploidy, tissue culture/somaclonal variation, marker assisted breeding, sport selection, your argument holds the same weight. What if I don't want wheat bred from strains altered with mutagenic radiation, or apples selected from sports, or bananas produced from tissue cultured clones plants, or citrus with extra chromosomes? Because guess what, they're all there, on the market, right now, no labeling, no safety testing. The only difference is that no one's ever made stink about them. You're irrationally singling out one thing while irrationally ignoring all the other genetic changes that are made to crops, which are almost always much larger and much more random and less understood than inserting a gene or two with GE

there have been no long term studies as to safety.

So, these studies [europa.eu], this study [tandfonline.com], this one [nih.gov], this one, [fbae.org] this one [nih.gov], didn't happen, and neither did any of these. [blogspot.com] You might want to do a bit more research before making statements like that. You know, they don't need to do safety testing for any other type of plant improvement, which is genetic modification (although not genetic engineering). I'm not saying they shouldn't be tested, but these things are plants, not drugs. If there isn't anything new in the that is biologically active, there is no reason to think that they're suddenly going to be dangerous (at least, no more than there is for any other type of genetic alteration). The cry proteins & EPSPS proteins (the two main ones inserted in GE crops right now) are NOT dangerous. That's not my opinion, that is the conclusion of pretty much all the literature on the subject, and just you haven't read it doesn't make it any less true.

Call me crazy, but I still want to make my own life choices, and not have the government and corporations make them for me.

Crazy, maybe not, but uninformed, absolutely. And government and corporations are not making the decision for you, they're making it for everyone else. If farmers want to g

It's just a lie. There's absolutely no reason for McDonald's to mix together meat from different continents. Not only would it be stupid since it would make it all but impossible to track down where tainted meat originated from, but it would be more expensive than just buying local beef.

You are wrong. I don't know about McDonalds, but large-chain supermarkets mix meat from different continents as a matter of course. Since in the Western world we have a fat surplus, they import lean beef from Botswana and mix the two to produce mince. About 60% of your store bought mince comes from Botswana if you shop at large chains owned by Ahold (to name just one).

Synthetic meat is still too expensive. This process will be optimized to a fabricated protein paste fed through a tube to power your assigned functions until you wear out and are flushed. Witness the progress of humanity.

And what do you think all those burgers ate when they were still cows? Soja and corn that was grown especially for them. For the soja alone, massive amounts of rainforest are cut down in countries like Brazil every year.

Especially if that first language is Catalan, French, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian, or Spanish (and probably several others I'm not thinking of right now), where the word is actually "soja".

Grazing animal use the massive tracts of un-airable land and don't require labor and oil and pesticide intensive production techniques.

Unfortunately, these same Grazing animals don't graze any more, and we have to bring the food to them. Oh, sure, there are "Free Range" animals, but the meat produced from them is more expensive. The majority of the meat produced from these Grazing Animals does require labor and oil and pesticide... because we must grow the food for these animals, harvest the food for these animals, and transport the food for these animals. That requires pesticide, labor, and oil.

Thus meat production *IS* more inefficient than growing vegetables, because it involves the process *OF* growing vegetables, plus a whole lot more.

Ok, ok... so Hay isn't any kind of vegetable you or I would eat. But it is still sown, grown, harvested and transported.

"Grass-fed beef has a distinctly different and “grassy” flavor compared with feed-lot beef and also costs more. A recent comparison in The Village Voice cooked up one-pound grass-fed and grain-fed steaks. The grass-fed meat tasted better, according to the article, but at $26 a pound, also cost about three times more."

Sure, there are tons of grazing animals. They still cost three times more per pound than cornfed or CAFO operation beef.

People who think meat is inefficient compared to vegetable don't understand that Grazing animal use the massive tracts of un-airable land and don't require labor and oil and pesticide intensive production techniques.
[...]
Eat a banana and it probably traveled 2500 miles, was grown in a chopped-down rain forest, with massive amounts of pesticide.

Excuse me, but you are either extremely naive or an idiot!
You really think that the animals that were farmed for meat all grazed happily on green meadows?
Yeah sure!
These are all lies after all:
"The escalation in forest destruction is driven by the global livestock industry. The vast majority (above 80%) of soybeans are bound for animal feedlots, providing protein for cattle, hogs and poultry. The European Union (EU) is the largest importer of Argentinian soybean meal, with imports to EU agribusinesses accounting for almost 50% of all global trade in soymeal (3)."
http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/the-expanding-soybean-frontier.pdf [greenpeace.org]

He's right, you're a retard. The crops don't salinate the soil, the irrigation does. Water from the sky has much less dissolved in it for the very reason that it had to evaporate to get there, but water from irrigation has been running all over the ground dissolving whatever it wants on the way. When it reaches the fields this dissolved material stays after the water is used by the crops and/or evaporates. It has been a problem with irrigation since it was invented.

If I want non meat protein, there's plenty of plant-based sources. If I want meat, I prefer it come from an animal. I have no qualms about killing an animal for meat. I also find sanitized supermarket packaging retarded. Trying to detach meat from the idea an animal died for it is twisted. People shouldn't hind from that fact and be respectful an animal died for the meat.

Do you believe the article? Industrial scale cell culture (think a number of very expensive pharmaceutical products) is incredibly complicated. You don't drop a bunch of stem cells into a vat and come back two weeks later.

What's not to believe? Obviously it's not as easy as dumping a bunch of stem cells in a vat and fishing out a steak two weeks later, if it was that easy we would already be eating synthetic meat. But just because it's difficult doesn't make it impossible. The right way to do it only needs to be figured out once.

Besides, the nice thing about cows is that you can make other cows from cows (paraphrased and modernized from Heinlein).

That applies to in vitro muscle cells just as well as it applies to the full animal.

It is actually interesting to see this article on here today, I was actually just reading information about the progression of human ethics and morality. From the past where anyone not of your own religion, skin colour, or gender were considered non-human and treated accordingly, to today's world where discrimination still happens, but is generally recognized as such within society and strongly discouraged, to a future where everyone is truly equal and discrimination is a thing of the past. One of the big thoughts brought forward of course is that in the past while people of other groups were treated as non-human, it was taken for granted that this was in fact the case, and while there may have been some people who believed otherwise, it was a generally accepted fact in society.

Now to the point, if our sense of morality was so different in the past, where will it be in the future? There is an argument that the way we treat (and eat) animals right now will look not much different to a person a couple hundred years from now than the way we now see the idea of how other races were treated a couple hundred years ago. I don't know if I agree with that sentiment or not, however it seems a logical extension of where morality has been to where it is going, and as a person living in today's society it is impossible to see what cultural biases might be clouding my judgement.

That said, I love meat, I plan to keep eating meat. Will I eat synthetically grown meat? I don't see why not, assuming they manage to make it taste close enough to the real thing (which is a tougher task than one might think, what we taste in meat is not just the raw muscle itself, but is also influenced by the way the animal as exercised, and the food it has eaten.)

Of course one more jab on the animal rights front, many animals alive today would simply not be here if humans didn't eat meat. While it may seem noble to not slaughter the cows for beef, it must be realized that if humans didn't eat meat most of those cows would never have lived in the first place. (same for almost any animal that humans regularly eat) I know many people on here were talking about feedlotting vs grazing, and while I know there must be a lot of feedlots, I've never seen one, and yet I can't drive five minutes on the highway around here without seeing fields full of grazing cows. I'm not sure if that's just coincidence, of if feedlots aren't as common in my area as real grazing is?

That said, I love meat, I plan to keep eating meat. Will I eat synthetically grown meat? I don't see why not, assuming they manage to make it taste close enough to the real thing (which is a tougher task than one might think, what we taste in meat is not just the raw muscle itself, but is also influenced by the way the animal as exercised, and the food it has eaten.)

That's a point a lot of people have raised... I'm actually surprised TFA didn't address it, because it was one of the first questions that Bob McDonald (of Quirks and Quarks on CBC, in Canada) asked the scientist, about 2 years ago when I first heard about this kind of project.

The scientist's answer wasn't that the meat was super tough, rather that it was very tender. The problem with the meat was that it was just a hunk of meat grown in a test tube... the science behind growing the meat had been well estab

Probably because it's creepy and is likely to come with any number of unforeseen consequences. Plus, just because it's like meat doesn't mean that it's going to have the same effect on the body. Which could be a good thing, but then again there's all sorts of nutrients that are no longer common in our diets because the food scientists designing our meals didn't think to include them. Iodine is a common one to be deficient in around here, and that's largely because it doesn't get added to our foods along with the salt.

And yet fully a quarter of all Americans are deficient in iodine. It's not a poster child for addition after the fact because it doesn't happen very often in the US. Just look at your foods if you don't believe me, it's rarely if ever included in processed foods, pretty much never in foods that are eaten at restaurants, and unless you specifically buy iodized salt chances are that it isn't in table salt either.

Perhaps if you weren't talking out of your ass we might make some progress on the issue. Just beca

You're the one talking out of your ass. Iodine levels in the US population are considered on average higher than they should be, according [who.int] to the World Health Organization. Maybe you should check your information before you parrot.

Do you really think there would be *that many* chickens, cows and pigs if we weren't raising them for the express purpose of eating them? It's not like we're culling wild herds here. You simply draw down the current stock, and you don't raise more. I don't expect that livestock for meat is going to vanish any time soon, but it could cause a lot of shift on the lower end. This is the sort of thing that fast food places would really be interested in if they could sell it. Probably as a new 'humane value menu'

Vegetarians like to say that they're getting all the protein they need. And by the numbers, beans and grains do have good amounts of protein... But these proteins are locked up for storage, and have Protease inhibitors [wikipedia.org] to interfere with their digestion. Trypsin [wikipedia.org] is what makes Soybeans so inedible...

Potatoes are the best vegan source of protein, because potatoes' defenses are against the microbes that cause rotting, whereas the above-ground portions of the plants have all sorts of defenses against animals.

Gelatin is a good source of protein because of the kinds of amino acids that it has, and does NOT have. The recent news about synthetic human gelatin [slashdot.org] is a bit more important than this form of synthetic meat, methinks.

Nonsense there are plenty of dietary sources of protein that don't include eating meat. You make it sound like soybeans are the only source. Ultimately the reason why most vegans and vegetarians don't get enough meat isn't that it's impossible it's that they aren't doing their homework to make sure that they're getting the range of proteins necessary to get the complete ones that the body can't synthesize.

I've personally known vegan powerlifters that showed absolutely no signs of protein deficiency.

There are many types of vegetarians, those who consume milk, eggs and honey won't have such problems. Also, most vegetarians I know eat fish. And even the hardcore zealots can survive by eating algae [wikipedia.org]. And they won't eat gelatin as it's made of animal bones.

True. I am a veterinarian too. I just use human meat as my definition of meat, and I never eat that. The cows I eat every day don't count.

More seriously, being a vegetarian is 'cool' to certain demographics. Those people don't really want to be vegetarian. They just want to be cool. Thus they rationalize why the animals they eat don't count. I have literally had 'vegetarians' tell me that only red meat counts as meat.

Besides the enzyme inhibitors, another poison in soybeans are the isoflavones, aka "phyto-estrogens". Estrogenic substances decrease the availability of oxygen and tell tissues to divide. Generally speaking, soybeans are only edible fermented, as a condiment. Cooking does not deactivate the isoflavones.

gelatin, for its limited range of benefits that can easily be found in plants, is rather controversial too, as its potential to transmit BSE/wiki/Gelatin#Safety_concerns [wikipedia.org] why not try some hempseed or flax seed instead?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_seed [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org]

Cats and dogs were never part of daily food for the vast majority of human mankind throughout history.

Eating whales WAS not unethical. Contributing NOW to the extinction of a mammal (or animal in general) IS unethical. It's a prime example for unethical behavior.Their IQ is irrelevant for your own behavior, but I suspect YOUR IQ is pretty low. So...Can I eat you? It shouldn't be unethical as you are as smart as a pig.

Actually, the domestic dog was used a food source for much of human history. Dogs were great to have around for protection and hunting, but when food was scarce, they were also great for eating. People couldn't always walk down the street to the supermarket to get food.

It is unethical to try to impose your opinions on others. I'm looking at you herbivores.

Most of the vegans that I know make no attempt to impose their lifestyle on anyone else. Maybe your experiance is different. PETA is a fringe group that does not remotely represent the typical vegetarian or vegan. Vegans can be kind of fussy, though. Apparently serving something that is only 95% vegan is considered unacceptable. Who knew?

I personally have no issues with meat. Cows aren't out in the pasture composing poetry. They're little more than machines that turn grass and corn into meat and manu

NO. Cultured meat is the product of a factory. Cow meat is the product of an inhumane series of tortures inflicted on a helpless animal.

Cows have been domesticated to the point that I seriously doubt the species could survive on it's own. If it ever comes to pass that synthetic meat supplants them then I'd guess that they'd quickly become an endangered/extinct species. At that point no one will be intentionally setting aside huge pastures for them to graze in . They would become a large destructive animal that has little to no natural habitat left.

A good parallel to this would be the Belgian draft horse [wikipedia.org]. They once were one of our most important exports and used literally everywhere. Then after WW2 they were supplanted by tractors and other motorized vehicles and the population in Belgium collapsed from 200.000 in 1950 to 6.000 in 1980. Now there's concern there might be to few foals born to preserve the breed [www.vilt.be].

I am however curious as to that answer, I've seen many people on here spouting the PETA talking points about cruel feedlots, but I live in cattle country and I've never seen a feedlot, I can't however drive 5 minutes on the highway without seeing field upon field of grazing cattle. Now it may be that my particular area is an anomaly, or that the massive feedlots are just better hidden, but I really am curious to know what percentage of cattle rai

These animals you see grazing are the breeding stock, not dairy nor beef cattle. They are never slaughtered. It is their calves that end up in the feedlots. Most dairy cows do not graze either because they are bred to the point where their udders drag on the ground, the animals step on their own udders and rent them asunder.

USA has 100 million cows. The turn over is around 50%. That is 50 million cows are slaughtered for beef every year. Your anecdotal observation of the cows you have seen grazing, do y

Animal pain. Animals do feel pain, and from the universal viewpoint of ethics, it doesn't matter whether it's you, me, some other human, an ape or a chicken that gets tortured. Pain is pain and our practices in factory farming causes a lot of it for only a little benefit, which is extremely unethical. (I know there are other approaches to animal's status, but there is no notable modern moral philosopher who disputes that the suffering of animals is a serious concern)

Environment. Did you know that animal production accounts for more greenhouse gases than all of the world's transportation? Yup, and that's not some veggie organization that claims that, but the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) [un.org]. It also takes up a lot of water, energy and is responsible for much of the destruction of the jungle.

Whale intelligence was first asserted to be equal to humans by a hippy who was on acid at the time. He spent the rest of his life doing acid and failing to teach dolphins how to talk. It has never been demonstrated, only repeatedly asserted.

The only evidence of dolphin intelligence was an excess of brain. Functional PET tests have shown the extra brain to be sonar signal processing nerve cells.

Chicken Little, a huge mass of cultured chicken breast, was kept alive by algae skimmed by nearly-slave labor from multistory towers of ponds surrounded by mirrors to focus the sunlight onto the ponds.

Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.

From The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth).
Published by St. Martin's Press in 1952

Read the link for the references to the REAL "Chicken Little" experiment that started it all.

It is one of the very few science fiction books that predicted the future, right down to context sensitive advertising on flat screens and the takeover of government by capitalism gone berserk. I'm surprised it isn't as well known as 1984, because Orwell got most of it wrong while Pohl and Kornbluth got an awful lot right.

We live in a near police state where citizens are repeatedly urged by friendly, paternalistic voices over loudspeakers in places of common congregation that "if you see something, say something." We are video recorded everywhere (at least in London, but I suspect the same is true in most cities these days). While we don't yet have observation systems directly in our houses, we're coming remarkably close what with technology that sees quite well through wa

Read the link for the references to the REAL "Chicken Little" experiment that started it all.

Then read this link [wikipedia.org] about the problems with the experiment, and then this link [wikipedia.org] which explains how the results of the first experiment are not now believed to be possible.

Short version: "Chicken Little" is like cold fusion. It's received a lot of press, but the experiment has not withstood scrutiny by the scientific community. The experiment has never been able to be replicated, and further experiments show

There was an art piece at the MOMA's Design and the Elastic Mind [moma.org] exhibit titled "Victimless Leather" which involved growing a batch of stem cells into the shape of a tiny jacket. The piece eventually had to be "killed" [grinding.be] when it grew out of control... as stem cells tend to do (and why their promise is over-exaggerated because they give you cancer [livescience.com]).

I appreciate people working on innovations like this, but we are decades and decades away from getting anything practical out of it. The meat we get from mother nature has billions of years of natural selection going into it, making it grow more efficiently. We co-evolved with it, meaning we are selected to make to the most efficient use of its nutrients. It's going to take a lot of time in the lab to match the nutrition and efficiency of muscle meat produced from 3.5 billion years of evolution.

The problem with your perspective is it assumes wrongly that this work is being done from scratch, read further out of context it would seem like you're saying that these researchers are creating tissue (and by extension a lifeform) that didn't exist before. This isn't the case. Natural selection isn't being thrown out the window, all that work is simply being isolated, packaged, and controlled. It will probably be adjusted as the work proceeds, but that isn't surprising considering the 'natural' process you vaunt in fact is focused on 'good enough' solutions. Life is a process for gene replication and everything else is gravy. Artificial selection is by definition more intelligent and efficient than natural selection, and unlike natural selection it can have goals in excess of simple gene survival.

Genuine kashrut rabbi and lurker from about '98 here, if they culture the cells from a freshly kosher slaughtered kosher animal then it would be forever kosher.If the animal were not killed first it would be ever min hachai or flesh stripped from a living animal and a rarity for Jewish kosher law considered forbidden to all humans(from the law given to Noah when humans were first permitted meat rathen for the Jews at Mt Sinai).Since the kosher status is for meat of the animal there might be room for an interpretation that subsequent cells grown form any animal are no longer that creature but simply a vat grown blob removing any kosher concerns and considering it something akin to candy made from all synthetic materials.

Well research in this vein (ha ha) should continue if for no other reason than it would be great to be able to have a big juicy steak on a space ship! Of course one could see all sorts of interesting (bad) things happening due to the combination of zero-g, cosmic rays and endlessly multiplying cells!

Does anyone know if there are any experiments in trying to make fish meat (sushi) along these lines? Pound for pound (or ounce for ounce) perfectly made uniform slabs of high grade fish have got to be the most expensive/valuable bits of non-human protein on the planet. I mean when a single (big) tuna costs several hundred thousand dollars in the Tokyo fish market, you know there could be profit for even an expensive technology.

Finally, (I know this is gross), would eating synthesized human flesh be considered cannibalism? I mean is cannibalism bad because you had to kill someone to eat or is it bad because you are eating meat with similar DNA? (Actually, it's probably the latter because it exposes you to all sorts of diseases that normally wouldn't survive because you'd be eating a different species). And would it taste like chicken?

Why, this destroys cells. The very basis of all life! It must be stopped!

You're such a villian that you even do it to your own cells!

How many cells did you callously murder last night when you took a drink of alcohol? Or even accidently bite the inside of your cheek.

And what about the flesh in between your fingers in the womb that you thoughtlessly put to cell death so you could selfishly have fingers. Or the skin cells you made thirst to death as formerly living shields against the outside world?

They have the right to control their own lives. But much of the time the signal comes from outside them! You have them so oppressed and in the slave mindset that they nearly always obey your order to die. They release those caspases to rip their own genetic material apart just for your sick pleasure.

In fact, when they don't you often call them derogatory names, like cancer.

It's not fake, artificial, or synthetic. It is cultured meat. I guess you could even call it vat meat, sci-fi has since before I was born.But in no way shape or form is it fake/artificial/synthetic. It was just grown without the rest of the animal.

For those of you that think it would be a generic meat slurry, that's not correct either. It would actually be chicken, or beef, or mutton, or albacore tuna, or whatever species provided the cell sample for that batch. It's true that diet of the animal changes the meat flavors (some species more than others), but that can be duplicated by changing the nutrient feed.Again, this isn't a new idea, and some people have thought a lot about it, even though they didn't have the technology to do it yet. Three big things seem to keep coming up as it's big points. Efficiency, Product Control, No animal slaughters.

Would I eat it? You know, the opportunity hasn't arisen, but I'd be willing to give it a try.At the moment, it's in kind of a primitive state, but eventually I'd expect those products to be of a higher quality than the old style.Although the first person to request a 'test tube steak' needs to get hit with a cutting board to the face, unless they're 12, in which case it's to be expected.:)

Oh, one final thought for you. I know this idea seems strange at first, but really, do you actually know what you are eating right now? Do you actually claim to know what a twinkie is made of? Or for that matter, what is Disodium Inosinate, TBHQ, or Acesulfame Potassium? Sure you can find out, but you haven't, and yet you eat foods with these and many other 'mystery' ingredients all the time. So why raise a huge fuss over actual chicken meat that was grown a lab as opposed to a poop covered chicken hutch? Think about it.

If it tastes like meat, I'm all for it. But it doesn't say what it tastes like.
But how could it possibly taste good? It may well be chemically identical to real meat, but I will bet dollars to soy based corn oil fried pastry replacements that it will taste like concentrated butthole.
What is so wrong with normal, delicious, non factory meat? IM FROM MURIKA, SON, THATS WITH AN M. THE M STANDS FOR MEAT. WHERE IS IT?!

Have you considered that maybe like say, programming, biology is also a big field with a lot of room for specialization?

Just because somebody can do a good job of writing an operating system doesn't mean they'd be a good game programmer. Same way, I don't see why this guy would necessarily have the right skills to work on diabetes.

Also, on what grounds do you think you can command people to do whatever research you think is important? If it's that big of a deal for you, why aren't you doing the research you